Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Science and Literature Series)

Seeing New Worlds

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE A series edited by George Levine

Seeing New Worlds Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science

Laura Dassow Walls

The University of Wisconsin Press

The University of Wisconsin Press 114 North Murray Street Madison, Wisconsin 53715 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 1995 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 54321 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walls, Laura / Dassow, 1955Seeing new worlds: Henry David Thoreau and nineteenth-century natural science / Laura Dassow Walls 318p. ern. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-14740-1. - ISBN 0-299-14744-4 (pbk.) 1. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862-Knowledge-Natural History. 2. Literature and science-United States-History-19th century. 3. Natural history-United States-History-19th century. 4. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862-Knowledge-Science. 5. United States-Intellectual life-19th century. 6. Science in literature. 7. Nature in literature. I. Title. PS3057.n3D37 1995 818' .309-dc20 95-7401

To my parents, John and Ethel Dassow

It may appear singular, but yet it is not the less correct, to attempt to connect poetry, which rejoices every where in variety of form, color, and character, with the simplest and most abstract ideas. Poetry, science, philosophy, and history are not necessarily and essentially divided; they are united wherever man is still in unison with the particular stage of his development, or whenever, from a truly poetic mood of mind, he can in imagination being himself back to it. -Wilhelm von Humboldt, quoted by Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

Introduction 1. Facts and Truth: Transcendental Science from Cambridge to Concord Nominalists, Realists, Idealists: Harvard and After, 1837 Romantic Theologies Natural History before Walden

xi xiii 3

15 16 24 35

2. The Empire of Thought and the Republic of Particulars

53

Law as Logos Rational Holism The Organic Machine: Making Matter Mind Emergent Laws Empirical Holism

54 60 70 76 84

3. Seeing New Worlds: Thoreau and Humboldtian Science

94

Alexander von Humboldt, the "Napoleon of Science" Fronting Nature at Walden, 1845-1847 After Walden: Old Worlds and New 4. Cosmos: Knowing as Worlding Thoreau as Humboldtian Relational Knowing: Thoreau's Epistemology of Contact Writing the Cosmos: Walden

95 108 116 131 134 147 157

IX

Contents

x

5. A Plurality of Worlds Intentions of the Eye Worlds without End: The Dispersion of Seeds The Transcendentalist at the Cattle Show: Thoreau's Ironic Science 6. Walking the Holy Land Contingent Wholes: A Few Herbs and Apples Chance and Necessity: The Laughter of the Loon "Walking, or the Wild" Conclusion: Disciplining Thoreau

167 170

179 199 212 213 223 232 246

Notes

255

Bibliography

280

Index

294

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have helped me over the course of this project's long inception and development. Long ago, at the University of Washington, Martha Banta and Robert E. Abrams first started me thinking about Thoreau. When I returned to graduate school at Indiana University, Lee Sterrenburg opened new worlds to me by showing me how I might bring together the exuberant, unpredictable, and self-aware world of nature with the many cultural constructions of it in history. His classes in literature and science suggested to me how literature might be the medium for studying these intersections of nature and mind, and affirmed for me that primary research and good teaching can inspire each other and hand to the willing student the reins of great possibility. Many others at Indiana University have helped me along the way. Particular thanks go to Kenneth Johnston, James Justus, Christoph Lohmann, and Cary Wolfe for reading the manuscript in its earlier stages, and offering generous and helpful advice all along the way. Frederick Churchill aided and abetted my Humboldt research at a crucial stage. Steve Watt, Pat Brantlinger, Kathryn Flannery, and Beverly Stoeltje all gave steady support and encouragement. Cynthia Jordan was a patient and deeply sympathetic advisor who quickly became a dear friend; both she and Wallace E. Williams helped start this journey, and they both ought to have been a part of it to the end. Finally, without my confederates in SLAG (or the Science and Literature Affinity Group, with thanks and apologies to Donna Haraway), this would be a thinner book; maybe not a book at all. Thanks to you all, especially to Richard Nash and Nancy Rutkowski, and to Anka Ryall. Many people beyond Indiana University have offered aid and encouragement. lowe special thanks to George Levine, who seemed to know what I was about even before I did; and to Bob Sattelmeyer, whose generous advice and encouragement have helped me find my way as a Thoreau scholar, and whose suggestions have made this book far stronger than it would otherwise be. Bill Rossi has directly and indirectly provided me with many insights and the kind of encouragement and wisdom so important to one first starting out, especially in a field as multilayered as this one. Dan Peck, Lisa New, xi

xii

Acknowledgments

Frederick Garber, Wes Mott, David Robinson, Richard Grusin, Ed Schofield, Brad Dean, Bob Richardson, Beth Witherell and her assistants at the Thoreau Edition have all given, at various points and in many ways, crucial advice and assistance. My colleagues at Lafayette College have been patient, sympathetic, and supportive of a project that must often look distinctly nonliterary; particular thanks must go to James Woolley, and to Jeffrey S. Bader and the Committee on Advanced Study and Research, who provided the financial means to bring this project to its completion. Finally, those closest to me know already how much they have been a part of this project in its very inception, and even more so as its life has become, over the years, my own. My deepest thanks go to Robert Walls, who constantly has believed in me, has pushed me farther than I would have dared to go alone, and has always been there to listen and to remind me, as a husband, a social historian, and a folklorist, that high literary and scientific abstractions ultimately take on meaning only from the texture of everyday life. And first and last of all, lowe more than thanks to my parents, John and Ethel Dassow. Their lives-my mother's as a writer and editor, my father's as a chemist and field biologist-and their aspirations are inscribed into the premises of my life's work, and to them this book is dedicated.

ABBREVIATIONS

Works by Henry David Thoreau CC CO CP DI EE FB LN MW NHE RP WA WK

Cape Cod Correspondence Collected Poems Dispersion of Seeds (in Faith in a Seed) Early Essays Thoreau's Fact Book Thoreau's Literary Notebook Maine Woods Natural History Essays Reform Papers Walden A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson CW Collected Works JMN Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks

Xlll

Seeing New Worlds

Introduction

Thoreau devoted the last ten years of his short life to studies that have puzzled generations of his commentators. What was the "transcendental" author of Walden doing out in all weathers, counting tree rings, listing plant species, measuring stream depths? These are not, on the face of it, very transcendental activities. It is difficult to imagine Emerson, for instance, scouting woodlots in the autumn rain, entering tree ring counts into a field notebook. And it is easy to imagine these activities as fatal distractions from the great task of writing the successor to Walden, and thus to marginalize them, in our disappointment, as the product of a declining and tragically misled talent. Yet there are at least two overriding reasons for attending carefully to these studies. The first is Thoreau's sheer joy in physical engagement with the woods, fields, and waters of Concord, evident still on every page of the late Journal. "Each new year is a surprise to us," he writes in 1858, many years into his project; a certain yew tree strikes him as "a capital discovery" (X:304, 306; 3/18/58).1 He is full of questions, astonishments: "How long?" "Who striped the squirrel's side?" (X:507-8; 6/24-6/25/58). "How interesting now ... the large, straggling tufts of the dicksonia fern above the leaf-strewn greensward, the cold fall-green sward!" (XII:370; 10/4/59). Already "surprised at the abundance" of the year's acorn crop, he is surprised again to see it destroyed by early frost; "It is a remarkable fact" that the labor of the oaks should thus be lost. As for that seemingly most deadly study of all, counting those endless tree rings: "Thus you can unroll the rotten papyrus on which the history of the Concord forest is written" (XIV:149, 152; 10/19/60). Second, 3

4

Seeing New Worlds

Thoreau himself felt he was on, not a retreat, but a real and affirmative quest, which was intrinsic to the totality of his career, the attempt to read and tell a history of man and nature together, as and in one single, interconnected act. The effort to read nature "whole" was shared by many of Thoreau's contemporaries: Goethe, Coleridge, Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin; Schelling, Paley, Whewell, Humboldt, Darwin. In an age steeped in Enlightenment ideals as well as Platonic idealism, and astonished by the recent successes of natural philosophy in explaining the fundamental forces of nature, such an effort must have seemed just possible. But how to go about it? On this there was no general agreement, and it is hardly accidental that the "scientific method" was established and modern science institutionalized during Thoreau's lifetime. Central to this book is the assertion that there is, in addition to the one narrative usually told about romanticism, a second competing narrative. The usual narrative finds the determining metaphors for romantic literature and science in the opposition of organicism and mechanism, a split which resulted by mid-century in the deliverance of emotive and "organic" literature from dry and "mechanical" science. But this narrative divides Thoreau from himself. Along with most of his contemporaries, Thoreau too conceived of nature as one great whole. However, he experienced two very different ways to approach and understand that whole. The first, which I call "rational holism," conceived the mechanico-organic whole as a divine or transcendent unity fully comprehended only through thought. In various forms, this holism characterized the Anglo-American tradition of natural theology, as well as Goethe and the German Naturphilosophen, Coleridge and British transcendental morphology, and finally Emerson and Agassiz. The second, "empirical holism," was an emergent alternative which stressed that the whole could be understood only by studying the interconnections of its constituent and individual parts. It was developed and exemplified by Goethe's friend Alexander von Humboldt and his friends and followers, including, most significantly for this study, Charles Darwin. I suggest that Thoreau's growing interest, through the late 1840s and 1850s, in particularized nature distinguishes him as a Humboldtian empirical naturalist. As a Humboldtian, Thoreau saw his task to be the joining of poetry, philosophy, and science into a harmonized whole that emerged from the interconnected details of particular natural facts. By acting as a Humboldtian naturalist, Thoreau participated in and helped to advance an alternative tradition of romantic science and literature that looked toward ecological approaches to nature and that was suppressed, then forgotten, by later organicist interpretations. Recovering this alternative tradition enables a new understanding of the problematical studies which fill the later years of Thoreau's Journal, which are also the years of his greatest literary productivity. Certainly there was a

Introduction

5

major shift in Thoreau's career, but I wish to redefine that shift: Thoreau transformed not from an Emersonian transcendental poet to a fragmented empirical scientist, but from a transcendental holist to something new which combined transcendentalism with empiricism and enabled innovative, experimental and postsymbolic modes of thinking and writing? This book offers an argument for a double romantic paradigm, attempting first to locate Thoreau within the dilemmas created by rational holism, then to follow as he encounters and embraces empirical holism, exploring in turn the dilemmas and the possibilities offered by a vision that sought to heal the growing split between poetry and science. For it was a vision that Humboldt offered-not a new world, but a new way of seeing that showed the old world to be fresh and unimagined. Under its spell, Thoreau would write: How novel and original must be each new mans [sic] view of the universe-for though the world is so old-& so many books have been written-each object appears wholly undescribed to our experience-each field of thought wholly unexplored- The whole world is an America-a New World. (4:421; 4/2/52)

Thoreau's labor in these years was cut short by his early death, but by 1860 he was shaping interlinked clusters of essays, drawing details of rural nature-acorns, autumn leaves, wild apples, huckleberries-into explorations of perception, epistemology, economics, and morality. In effect, what came after Walden was a deep concern with what comes after: with principles of succession, continuity, daily sustenance, and the ongoing, chaotic processes of life. "The sun climbs to the zenith daily high over all literature & science," continues Thoreau in the passage above; "-astronomy even concerns us worldlings only-but the sun of poetry & of each new child born into the planet has never been astronomized, nor brought nearer by a telescope. So it will be to the end of time. The end of the world is not yet." Before proceeding, it might be helpful to add a few words on the interdisciplinary nature of this project. This rereading of Thoreau's career requires a rethinking of the disciplinary barriers that have kept Thoreau in an uneasy intermediary position, straddling a widening chasm between the hostile camps of literature and science? The "two cultures" may seem a truism today, but in the 1840s and 1850s, the relationship between "literature" and "science," while complex, was hardly hostile. Science was neither so monolithic nor so intimidating as now. Educated readers turned with ease to the primary works of scientists, and responded directly to the arguments advanced therein; scientific and technological advances were seen as signs of the times, part of the buzz and flux of the newspapers, parlors, and periodicals, right alongside-often the subject of-poems and stories and gossipy

6

Seeing New Worlds

fillers. 4 Even the nature and degree of their differences were not the same as today, making it necessary to recover what Thoreau meant by "philosophy," "poetry," and "science," rather than impose our meanings anachronistically. This problem is complicated by the fact that Thoreau's own discourse shifts, both as his concerns change and as these terms shift meaning within a broader social context. As a student at Harvard in the 1830s, Thoreau studied mechanics, astronomy, optics, and electricity under the rubric of "natural philosophy," and the title of his zoology text, an "eighteenth-century classic of physicotheology" by William Smellie, was The Philosophy of Natural History.5 Though the word "scientist" had been coined by William Whewell in 1833, by analogy with "artist," it was not yet in general use and would not be for some decades, largely because of resistance to the narrow professionalization it implied.~ Meanwhile, "natural philosophy," "natural history," and "science" were virtually interchangeable, and a person practicing in any of them was usually called a "man of science" or a "philosopher."7 Similarly, "poetry" could designate not just verse or belles lettres but the creative human spirit generally, Wordsworth's "breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," a spirit which could manifest itself in science quite as well as verse. 8 But all of these terms and concepts were actively changing. By 1862, the year of Thoreau's death, "natural philosophy" was rapidly becoming obsolete on both sides of the Atlantic. Louis Agassiz was aggressively promoting "science" at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School, and the forces that were feeding the success of the American Association for the Advancement of Science were meanwhile demoting "natural history" to merely amateur status. Soon scientists were writing exclusively for each other, and a new class of popularizers arose to interpret their work to the lay public. Our familiar, present-day boundaries were beginning to be drawn and defended. Implicit in the broad, old-fashioned terms still current in the 1830s was the assumption that all knowledge formed a unified whole, within the common context of natural theology.9 A canonical work for its time was John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), which defined and illustrated what would come to be called the "scientific method." For Herschel, man's world is "a system disposed, with order and design" by "a Power and an Intelligence superior to his own" (4), and science is a means to its contemplation and use. Before tabulating the progress of the branches of "physics," he impresses upon his readers that "natural philosophy is essentially united in all its departments, through all which one spirit reigns and one method of enquiry applies" (219). But we are unable to study it as a whole, "without subdivision into parts" (219); thus by what he elsewhere calls a "division of labour" (131), the "parts" arise: in the physical sciences, acoustics, optics, astronomy, geology, crystallography,

Introduction

7

mineralogy, chemistry; in biology, physiology (the study of "organization and life"), zoology, botany. Collective human endeavor can grasp the whole, but individual limitations necessitate division into disciplines. Hierarchies are forming: geology is second in sublimity only to astronomy; experimental sciences like mechanics are making rapid progress; observational sciences must make "slow, uncertain, and irregular" progress unless and until they too become susceptible to experiment (77-78). Specialization and disciplinary boundaries ultimately prevailed because they created the conditions for an astonishing productivity. But while natural philosophers and poets together hailed the growth of knowledge, they also viewed its consequent subdivision and fragmentation with dismay. Voice after voice calls for knowledge to be made whole again, for the great system to be conceived entire, for all to remember and reiterate, as does Herschel, that the essence of the universe is not division but unity. Emerson's 1837 address "The American Scholar" voices the hope and the fear: there is but "One Man,-present to all particular men only partially ... you must take the whole society to find the whole man." In the "divided or social state," functions must be parceled out to individuals; each must, to "possess himself," sometimes return from his labor to embrace the others. "But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered." The amputated "members" of society are so many "walking monsters,-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man" (CW 1:53). Instead of men, they are so many things. It was shortly after this address that Thoreau came under Emerson's mentorship, to be confirmed and assisted in his own effort to be such a "whole" individual. For serious intellectuals of his time, such an effort might embrace human knowledge, attained and attainable, in whatever form: arts and manufacture; poetry and the creative spirit; science and philosophy. Thoreau took it upon himself to achieve in all three. As his writing matures, he is not so much conflicted as experimenting with new ways to keep fields and activities united that we now perceive to have been diverging permanently. To follow his lead requires the historian to work across disciplinary boundaries as they exist today. Indeed, what discipline can safely be left out? This study draws from literary theory, the history and philosophy of science, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Thoreau was also a classical scholar and an engineer, a critic of capitalist politics and economies, attentive to aesthetic theory and the visual arts, a contributor to folklore and to environmental science. Of course no study of his time dare ignore social or political history, the construction of race or gender, nor, as should already be clear, theology.

8

Seeing New Worlds

If competence is required in all these fields, then responsible interdisciplinarity is doomed, an oxymoron. But I proceed nevertheless, under the conviction that what now exists as a fractured kaleidoscope of academic specialties existed in Thoreau's day as a more or less experientially unified field. This study, then, looks toward a reconstruction of nineteenth-century interdisciplinarity which asks how, out of a continuous if not unified "field of strategic possibilities," differences emerged to fracture it. 10 Theoretical formulations are emerging which can underpin and enable such a study, particularly one that works across the "two cultures" of literature and science. N. Katherine Hayles discusses disciplinary convergences and differences in terms of a shared cultural matrix, in which parallels operate through the general cultural field, "a diffuse network of everyday experience," and dissimilarities through distinct disciplinary traditions which guide inquiry and shape thought. "The dual emphasis on cultural fields and disciplinary sites implies a universe of discourse that is at once fragmented and unified." Isomorphisms arise in different discourses in response to a shared cultural environment, while disciplinary differences are maintained through the perpetuation of economic infrastructures; Michel Serres' concept of equivocation, the effort both to celebrate "noise" locally and to suppress it "in global theories," offers a way for the theorist located at the "crossroads of disciplines" to mediate between them. The result is an attempt to create "an equivocal site at which both disciplines can have a voice." Her vision is not of science influencing literature (or vice versa) "but of literature and science as two mingled voices."ll That said, I must of course own up to my own disciplinary site: my inquiry is guided and my thought shaped by traditions within the discipline of English and American literary history. But I focus on a canonical literary figure precisely because those disciplinary traditions do not account for his activity. My disciplinary site both determines and enables my own "line of sight," by establishing my concerns in the context of literary criticism, theory, and history; but for Thoreau, deeply concerned with both the enabling and the limiting character of site and sight, a purely literary account proves inadequate. Thoreau, significantly, did develop and employ a working scientific methodology. Thus I hope to show that Thoreau, too, is such a "theorist" at the "crossroads of disciplines," mediating between the disciplinary economies of "literature" and "science" through particular linguistic and conceptual structures, in an effort to see them as fundamentally coincident even as they were, historically, dissociating each from the other. The "two mingled voices" of literature and science are distinctly heard in his own work, though his own favorite metaphor for this mingling is not aural but visual: he experiments with what he calls "intentionality of the eye." If the field is

Introduction

9

fundamentally unified, then perhaps perception and cognition join to create from it particular and varying views. Disciplinary differences are evoked by approaching the "uni-verse" with consciously varied intentions. Each discipline becomes in effect a mental lens, a mode of perception as well as of discourse. Hayles's use of terms like "discourse" and "voice" intimates that an underlying connection between disciplines exists in language. This is made explicit in George Levine's discussion: literature and science are, indeed, "modes of discourse," languages which both differ and converge: "science and literature reflect each other because they draw mutually on one culture, from the same sources, and they work out in different languages the same project." This view draws on antifoundationalist arguments (such as those of Feyerabend and Latour), which counter the conventions of naive realism by reversing most of its assumptions: science does not objectively discover hidden truth, but creates theories whose coherence and social valence determine both the data and the degree of acceptance on which their authority supposedly rests. This analysis of science, Levine notes, moves into the "literary fold," but importantly does not subvert science but rather "historicizes and humanizes it." Once science is no longer seen as clearly separable from other humanistic enterprises, literature and science involve each other: "Literature becomes part of the history of science. Science is reflected in literature. And the tools of literary criticism become instruments in the understanding of scientific discourse." For the common medium is, necessarily, language. 12 Levine continues to distinguish them even on this ground: they are "modes" of discourse, not the same mode; "different languages," not identical. For Thoreau, science was, precisely, a "language," and it is for this reason that he became so interested in it: What were its expressive possibilities? As a language, science was enabling, a site which gave him "sight." This characteristic is most explicit in his love of scientific names, which made visible modes of reality that otherwise went unseen. But at times Thoreau experimented with a more radical formulation: literature and science were not different languages, but in their purest and highest form inseparable, both "simply some human experience" (VI:236-37; 5/5/54). As personal experience, the best science, and the best poetry, would come together and would "read" the same. This position is echoed today by the radical interdisciplinarity of the "strong programme" of the sociology of scientific knowledge: in Steve Woolgar's words, once science and society can no longer be studied as "separate analytic objects ... these conceptions collapse into one another." That conventional triad, "science, technology, and society," is traditionally diagrammed as interconnected but not overlapping, but "the

10

Seeing New Worlds

radical view maps these entities one on top of the other," comprising "a single domain." Science does not have "'social aspects'" but "is itself constitutively social." A scientific theory, then, must be spoken of not as objectively true, but as a more or less "stable construction."l3 With such a view all the barriers are down. Once the demon of "social construction" is let loose, a single social field-or a multitude of variously contested fields-is the only logical outcome. All disciplines collapse back into the "one culture," or the unifying "cultural matrix," out of which Hayles and Levine see the emergences of different discourses. It is tempting to equate Thoreau's own view with this radical formulation, because it corresponds in some degree both to the nineteenth-century view of the world as a cosmic whole, and to Thoreau's more radical attempts to embrace poetry, philosophy, and science simultaneously. But as Donna Haraway worries, if all nature is a social construction, a projection onto a "screen," it is, essentially, dead. Haraway's solution is to acknowledge, and give voice to, the multiplicity of living agents, not in a global or totalized space but locally, in what she calls "situated knowledges." Haraway asserts the redemptive value of "sitedness"-of knowledge that has the enabling properties of being sited, in discipline, place, history, gender, personality: "The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular." Thoreau's conscious experimentation with intentional and partial vision centered in personal, empirical experience anticipates Donna Haraway's quest for a "feminist objectivity" which defies the transcendent God-vision of the unmarked gaze by insisting on the "embodied nature of all vision," through eyes which are "active perceptual systems.,,14 Both Thoreau and Haraway look to the same end: sight that is answerable to what it sees. Her stress on "situated knowledge" has particular relevance to Thoreau's project, sited, with peculiar attention, in the disciplines of philosophy, science, and literature; in Concord, Massachusetts; in the empirical/imperialist nineteenth century; in his own complexly gendered, aggressively idiosyncratic self. To "situate" knowledge also means acknowledging the limitations of being locally sited: surrender of the power of universality. One must allow others their voices and not attempt to globalize the local, to break falsely through limitations by universalizing them. 15 Thoreau was faced with the problem of inhabiting both the local and the global, or how to move between the particulars of his time, place, and temperament, and what he often called "higher law"-or between history and myth-without sacrificing either extreme. Along a slightly different axis, he valued both what he called "extravagance," or proliferation, unpredictability, and excess whether in rhetoric or in nature; and "purity," the simple, lawful truth that kept extravagance from fracturing into mere mannerism. The latter he frequently encoded as "science" or "philosophy," the former as "poetry"

Introduction

11

or "language.,,16 Though he sought them both, simultaneously, in "the field" -of his own culture, of the Concord landscape, and of his own sense of self-his search was not conducted according to any of the single models available to him. That is, he finally could not accept the idealist move, to reach the universal by annihilating the restraints of the local and particular; nor did he accept the limited and methodically realized aims of the scientist's methods. Or rather, he did accept them both-by a process of reconciliation modeled for him in much of the discourse of the time, which sought to bring together polar opposites into new, progressive, higher unities. This common feature of nineteenth-century thought was systematized and theorized by William Whewell, who named it "consilience": the advancement of knowledge that occurs when apparently unconnected classes of facts are seen to have "jumped together" to form a new, simpler, and more unified theory. This new knowledge is not "the mere sum of the Facts": "The Facts are not only brought together, but seen in a new point of view. A new mental Element is superinduced" upon the particulars (153, 139), and this mental element or "new conception" is "a principle of connexion and unity, supplied by the mind" (163). In nineteenth-century terms, Thoreau rejected neither poetry nor science, nor did he simply "reconcile" them, collapsing them together. In the "consilience" of Emersonian transcendental wholes with Humboldtian empirical science, he sacrificed neither but attempted to create a way of knowing which combined them both into something new. In today's terminology (Whewell's useful word not having survived, a fact revealing in itself), this integration of knowledge into a new, coherent entity describes the highest level of interdisciplinary studies, where disciplines are not juxtaposed additively but integrated into a new synthesis. The ultimate goal is something even more comprehensive: what Erich Jantsch, in an influential formulation, calls "transdisciplinarity," signifying "the interconnectedness of all aspects of reality, transcending the dynamics of a dialectical synthesis to grasp the total dynamics of reality as a whole. ,,17 Here is a twentieth-century return to that nineteenth-century hope, poised as it was on the verge of the disciplinary fragmentation that made it seem an unrealizable romantic dream. Thoreau was preoccupied with this innovative work from the mid-1840s on, when he was exploring and applying his developing insight in modes that are often experimental and always unstable and interactive. The result could be called a kind of situated knowledge, which celebrates his own locale but also seeks to interlink with each and every locale; to give voice to all the agents creating the world he knew, human and nonhuman, present, future, and past; to celebrate his own individuality, not to colonize his readers but to inspire their own parallel celebration; to reach a connective truth through the commonplace particulars of daily life in a place exemplary only in its ordinariness. His act of consilience seeks to give voice to all the participating

12

Seeing New Worlds

agents, not by blending them together but by giving each a distinct hearing in a medium of sustained attention. In consiliating literature and science, Thoreau tried to enable and enact both, as real knowledge situated in, not beyond, the world; and since language is the medium of our knowledge for Thoreau, the sustained and daily use of language was the necessary way to knowledge of his world. One final possibility, then: given his persistent concern with the problem of disciplinarity (and his interest in theoretical and actual "transgressions" of discipline), his project may have been less pre- than postdisciplinary, and his experiments may have value to us today, not as antiquarian remnants of time passed, but as models of a postdisciplinary practice. This practice was incipient in his published work, and may have been more fully realized had his early death not left his work unfinished. All the more, then, will rediscovering it help us to interrogate the familiar canonical figure of Thoreau anew, and in the process interrogate ourselves as well. If nineteenth-century boundaries were fluid and permeable, it is now all the more necessary not to solidify them in retrospect, anachronistically. This conviction has directed the method of this study, which began with a reading of what Thoreau read and what he wrote-together, in chronological sequence-in an attempt to inhabit something of the same field of knowledge as he. One inspiration was Martin Rudwick's call for "empirical studies of science in the making" that would focus on a problem that brought together a group of individuals in "an interacting network of exchange," making "'small facts speak to large issues.'''18 Hence I hope to make the small facts of Thoreau's curious field studies speak to the larger issues of literature and science in Thoreau's career, and potentially the very large issue of literature and science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Another inspiration was Robert M. Young's acerbic suggestion: "Instead of burrowing deeper into the minutiae of critical receptions of Victorian novels, it might be worthwhile to pay closer attention to the works and the movements which evoked so much Victorian writing"-